L'Atlas des Cendres

L’Atlas des Cendres — the atlas of the ashes — is a duo for percussion and piano of six or seven minutes, written in Paris for the soloists of Ensemble Multilatérale in Yann Robin’s composition workshop at the Conservatoire de Saint-Maur, and dedicated to the ensemble.

An atlas is a book of places; ashes are what is left when a place has burned. The piece maps a territory that no longer exists. It privileges physical intensity, sustained tension and gestural clarity over surface precision: the complex rhythmic notation represents energy, density and flow rather than exact mechanical alignment, and the players are asked to commit fully to the physical and sonic extremity of the material, avoiding neutrality or caution. In the dense, motoric passages the percussionist leads and the pianist holds the written texture against her; vertical alignment is approximate except at the marked attacks and arrivals. The pianist works largely inside the instrument and on a prepared keyboard, the percussionist between skins, metals and friction, so that the two share a single grey, granular palette out of which short melodic shards surface and are covered again. The form is a slow turning of pages: each section a region, each region already half erased.

It was premiered on 18 February 2026 at the Conservatoire de Saint-Maur-des-Fossés by Lise Baudouin (piano) and Hélène Colombotti (percussion).